And the newest collection of Featured Poets, includes award-winning poet Mary Jo Bang.

Bang’s book, The Bride of E, was instrumental in my understanding of making associations in poetry. Her eclectic assembly of words plays with obscurity to reveal our existential condition as associative beings, and challenges what we think we know versus what we don’t yet know. She believes, “obscuration in a poem can be a means of forcing the reader to read carefully, to become aware of the difficulty of reading poetry.”(1) This awareness calls for our attention to read slowly, think consciously, to be alert, keen, and sensitive readers which ultimately carries over to our writing, and to our ability to think interconnectecdly, of what our place is in the collective whole.

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One of our venues,The Grolier Poetry Bookshop is reaching out for help, asking for donations to keep its doors open. Stepping into this bookshop is liking stepping into Poetry’s Akashic Records, rich in poet history, with a quiet, almost sacred energy. It is the oldest all-poetry bookshop in America, coming up on their 90th anniversary!

Grolier wants to continue to serve you by hosting significant poetry events, celebrating the latest poetry books, and honoring new and established poets.

“The book shop has been a home to many great poets, and poetry lovers from all over the world. Grolier has been home to many great poets, such as Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Creeley, ee cummings, TS Eliot, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, Maryanne Moore, and Adrienne Rich. More recently, we have featured Frank Bidart, David Ferry, Michael McClure, Kimiko Hahn, Maxine Kumin, Robert Pinsky, Ariana Riens, and Franz Wright.
Ifeanyi Menkiti, a Nigerian-born poet and longtime philosophy professor at Wellesley College, purchased the store in 2006. Menkiti dips into his own pockets to replenish the store and keeps a very lean staff; but even with these efforts, there is no denying the struggle independent bookstores endure. Keeping poetry, and all of its richness, alive means the world to us. Through reading, writing, and sharing it, many of us have created and found homes. Providing a center to celebrate writing has always been our greatest joy, and though we continue to host events and readings, we would greatly appreciate your help to keep our ‘home’ going.”

Please go to the Go Fund website and search for Grolier Legacy in Cambridge MA

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p2g welcomes poet Sarah Lain as one of its ambassadors. She will be supplying two venues in St. Petersburg, and Tampa to broaden p2g’s readership, and helping out as a reader for all the terrific submissions coming in everyday. Thank you Sarah, and thanks to all of the poets submitting work, considering p2g as a possible home for their poetry. We’re happy to be reading submissions from students to nonagenerians, from all over the world.

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To welcome in 2016, we have five new featured poets and their poems. One is a local, another is a national, and three are global. p2g is thrilled to be reaching beyond its New England borders, bringing poetry from around the world, and bringing us all closer to our sense of universality and experience as a collective whole.